Metaphor in Dante

Our first example of a writer who manages to judge phenomena utilizing metaphors will be Dante in the three books of his Divine Comedy.

Inferno

While Dante is certainly not the first or last writer to imagine what happens to sinners in Hell, it has to be said that the punishments he invents are somehow distinctive. For example, hypocrites wear cloaks that 'Outwardly they were gilded dazzling-bright, /But all within was lead, and, weighed thereby' (Dante 1979: [c.1314] Canto XXIII, ll.64–5, 215).

Extreme flatterers such as the courtesan who, when asked by her lover: 'To what degree, have I earned thanks, my love?' replied: 'O, to a very miracle,' have dung coming out of their mouths (Dante 1979: Canto XVIII, ll.133–5, 185). Persons noteworthy for violent tempers are 'tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth' (Canto VII, l.114, 113). Those fated to be submerged in a 'thick pitch', visible only as 'great bubbles black as ink' (Canto XXI, l.19, 201), turn out to have been notorious bribers who specialized in 'subsurface deals and secret money-grubbing' (Canto XXI, l.54, 202).

Attempting to depict what is special about Dante's treatment of these and other sinners, his translator, Dorothy Sayers, writes: 'The "punishment" for sin is simply the sin itself, experienced without illusion' (Dante 1979: 102, note by Sayers). In a similar vein, one of the best Dante interpreters, Charles Williams, writes: 'These punishments [...] are, in some sense, the sin itself' (Williams 1943: 128).

While we will need to specify what Dante's method is for removing any 'illusion' and what 'some sense' could be referencing, both Sayers and Williams are right that Dante does have a way of getting us to experience the sin itself, i.e. its nature, its being. I suggest that he gets us to see what the sin is by managing to depict what it is like. It is, then, by finding an appropriate comparison — a good metaphor — that Dante manages to reveal the nature of these and other sins that place people in the Inferno. However, it is fair to say that not all the metaphors are quite as self- explanatory as the ones noted so far.

Sometimes it helps to know the specific cases of a sin that Dante has in mind. Thus, it begins to make more sense that Dante envisions suicides as trees with 'Discolored leaves and dark, no tender shoots, /But withered and gnarled and tough, no fruit' (Dante 1979: Canto XIII, ll.5–6, 149) once we learn that he is particularly thinking of 'a kind of "suicide wave" about Dante's time' that afflicted the young of Florence (155, note by Sayers).

We might guess that the fate of those so unable to stay separate from other people that they merge with them, taking the following form in Hell, are thieves: 'Ivy to oak never so rooted grew [...] their tints began to mingle and to run/And neither seemed to be what it had been' (Dante 1979: Canto VIII, ll.58–63, 228).

However, it is still informative to learn that one of these thieves whose fate is for 'two faces to fuse themselves, to weld one countenance' (Dante 1979: Canto VIII, ll.71–2, 229) had as his modus operandi: 'to have got into people's houses, disguised as an old beggar' (301, note by Sayers). That is, his fate seems right because how he behaved is like not having a face of his own.

Sometimes it can be necessary to know how Dante understands the sin in order to appreciate how appropriate the metaphor is. Once we know that Dante saw heresy as 'an obduracy of the mind [...] an intellectual obstinacy' (Williams 1943: 125, quoted in Dante 1979: 132, note by Sayers), it makes more sense that the fate of heretics is to be constantly forging an iron coffin for themselves. That is, confining themselves in this way is like what they are doing by being so obstinate.

Other times, local knowledge of the material out of which Dante composes his metaphors can improve our understanding. Once we know that

in Dante's church, the font in the Baptistery was surrounded by holes in which the officiating priests stood, so as not to be jostled by the crowds on days when a great number of bambinos were being baptized at once. (Dante 1979: 192, note by Sayers)

it becomes clearer why Dante imagines the fate of those who sold sacraments as being plunged headfirst into this type of hole. Selling such holy things is like turning one's priestly function upside down.

That Dante's way of understanding a sin is to find an appropriate metaphor for it also applies to what is said to be 'the greatest image in the whole Inferno' (Dante 1979: 275, note by Sayers). Traitors such as Judas and the devil himself are wedged in 'a lake so bound with ice, it did not look like water but like glass' (Canto XXXII, ll.23–4, 271). Sayers suggests how original this version of these sinners' fate is: 'The conception is, I think, Dante's own. Although the Apocalypse of Paul mentions a number of cold torments, these are indiscriminately mingled with the torments by fire and their placing has no structural significance' (275, note by Sayers).

Clearly, Dante's idea is that this is the fate of traitors because to be a traitor is like being ice cold, i.e. to not be able to be receptive even to the warmth that would inevitably be emanating from those closest to us.

As can be anticipated if the argument in the Introduction is sound, syllogisms would be of little use in judging these phenomena. For example, a minor premise that one could perhaps adopt in trying to demonstrate that extreme flattery or hypocrisy is wrong might be that these behaviors amount to lies. But this is debatable and, even if it could be established, it of course remains unclear that to lie is necessarily wrong. Or, even if most would agree with the minor premise that traitors are disloyal, it is not at all evident that disloyalty is necessarily a bad thing.

Instead of trying to show that these behaviors are logically wrong, Dante tries to show how painful they are. To the extent that his metaphors seem appropriate, he is demonstrating that to do any of these things is actually a form of suffering. Even if (which we deny) one could conclude that flattery, hypocrisy, treachery, bribery, violent temper, and the rest were logical mistakes, one would have to have an uncommon level of commitment to logic to go so far as to suffer if all one seemed to be making was a logical mistake. One consequence of this weakness of logic is revealed by the fact that even acts that are deemed to be clearly illogical (such as randomly killing total strangers) tend to require external sanctions — punishments — in order to deter them.

Here we begin to see the singular force of judgments that can stem from an analysis of the nature of things in themselves rather than from existing premises, whether major or minor, that supposedly apply to them. There is no need to...